In 2007, Austin made the bold decision to use 100 percent renewable resources by 2012 as part of its climate action plan. By October 2011, it had achieved this ambitious goal. Read on to discover how America's most sustainable city did it.

Gary Southern, CEO of Freedom Industries, makes the guys at Snapchat look like boy scouts. His company is responsible for a chemical spill in the Elk River that has left 300,000 people in West Virginia without water. It doesn't help that he is a bit of a spineless dick in interviews with the press.

Now, see it materialize. Ki claims to have the world's first carbon-negative chair made with AirCarbon --a thermoplastic developed by California-based Newlight Technologies that captures carbon from the air.

When Michael Mann chose a career in science, he didn't think that he would be denounced on billboards, grilled by hostile legislators on Capitol Hill and in the British House of Commons, have his emails hacked and stolen, receive letters laced with an anthrax-like white powder, and become the target of anonymous death threats.Mann also did not imagine that he would be spending quite so much time with lawyers and in courtrooms. Today, he is the plaintiff in a controversial case that is being argued before the Virginia Supreme Court.

New research reinforces human-caused global warming and a climate that's highly sensitive to an increased greenhouse effectNew research suggests that clouds amplify global warming, and the sun plays a minor role. Photograph: Frank RumpenhorstOver the past few weeks, several important new papers related to human vs. natural climate change have been published.

Leading solar crowdsourcing firm Mosaic is the latest entrant into clean energy’s next big market: off-grid applications. Thanks to a grand prize of $1 million from Verizon Powerful Answers, Mosaic will develop a mobile app, and expand loan products to emerging markets in Africa, Brazil, India and Asia. With Machine to Machine (M2M) technology poised to unlock clean energy for hundreds of millions of people around the world, the move couldn’t be more timely. Making solar accessible to anyone is a key part of Mosaic’s mission.

The decision by Warren Buffett’s utility company to order about $1 billion of wind turbines for projects in Iowa shows how a drop in equipment costs is making renewable energy more competitive with power from fossil fuels.

The information and views expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of RenewableEnergyWorld.com or the companies that advertise on this Web site and other publications. This blog was posted directly by the author and was not reviewed for accuracy, spelling or grammar. According to a new report by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the U.S. installed 930 megawatts (MW) of photovoltaics (PV) in Q3 2013, up 20 percent over Q2 2013 and 35 percent over Q3 2012.

According to a new report released by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), soft costs accounted for 63.5% of total costs of residential solar installations, 56.7% for small commercial systems ( Balance-of-System (Soft) Costs for U.S. Photovoltaic Systems, Using a Bottom-Up Approach and Installer Survey, broke down soft costs into the following categories: sales tax, supply chain costs, installer/developer profit, indirect corporate costs, transaction costs, customer acquisition, permit fee, PII labor, and installation labor.

The push for green energy in the United States may be hindered by the limitations of our outdated power grids, which are unsuited for unpredictable energy sources like sunlight and wind, according to Los Angles Times' Evan Halper.The current grid system is designed to "keep the supply of power steady and predictable," Halper writes.

The U.S. Department of State is organizing and hosting a U.S. Center at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties. Selected U.S. Center side events will be streamed online through the UStream interactive broadcasting platform. Online programming provides a virtual space for the interactive exchange of ideas, in which participants from anywhere in the world can congregate and discuss issues of concern.

The Indiana Municipal Power Agency (IMPA) is the not-for-profit wholesale power provider to 59 cities and towns across Indiana and one Ohio community who own and operate the municipal electric distribution systems in their communities. IMPA member communities deliver electric service to approximately 330,000 individuals throughout the state, and now they will do so with solar.The Indiana Municipal Power Agency will have solar installed on a 1-MW site near Richmond, Ind. The project is expected to generate 1615 MWh/year of renewable energy for IMPA’s members.

Americans spend thousands of dollars on their energy bills each year, contributing not only to increased financial pressure, but also to greater carbon emissions. While heating and lighting are the biggest contributors to high energy bills, electronic devices are starting to take an even bigger chunk out of household expenses. With people buying up ever larger TV sets and more and more gadgets to make their lives more efficient and entertaining, these gadgets are having a detrimental impact on both wallets and the environment.

Off-grid applications are cleantech's next big market. Nowhere is this more true than in Africa, where the International Energy Agency predicts population growth will outstrip grid expansion to leave 645 million people without power. It’s predictably tough for companies in this vast market to stick out from the pack. In order to get a sense of how companies can achieve success in this space, I sat down to chat with Mansoor Hamayun, the CEO of U.K.-based BBOXX, on the eve of a Series A investment from Khosla Impact.

The Global 100% Renewable Energy Coalition has called on governments to commit to 100% renewable energy targets and strategies.A joint statement at the UN climate summit today asserted that “communicating and proving the urgency and feasibility of 100% renewable energy is key to breaking the climate deadlock”.Members of the coalition including the World Wind Energy Association, World Bioenergy Association and the Fraunhofer ISE Institute also criticised “the ongoing stagnancy of the climate negotiations and their struggle to agree upon and implement measures that effective

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which uses a high-pressure stream of water, chemicals and sand to blast through deep layers of shale rock to extract natural gas and oil, has become one of the most contentious energy issues of our time. But who are the people who made the shale boom happen? Zuckerman, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, spent most of his career covering business and finance and realized that natural gas development was the biggest business story of today. His latest book, The Frackers, profiles six energy tycoons.

I have written frequently to explain how dramatic expansion of unconventional oil like bitumen in Canada is found by all leading international analysts to be inconsistent with the 2 C limit our political leaders promise to strive for. The same is true for any expansion of coal-fired power plants. For this reason, I agreed to sign my name to this statement by leading researchers on the urgent need for no new coal plants, anywhere in the world, unless they capture and store the carbon pollution. We can no longer allow the construction of new, unabated coal plants. Our press release is below.

Japanese mobile telecom company Softbank and trading company Mitsui & Co have announced that the two companies will partner in the construction of two utility-scale solar plants in Japan. Japanese news outlets reported that SB Energy, the division of the Softbank Group responsible for renewable energy generation, and Mitsui & Co, one of Japan's largest trading companies, will build a total of 42MW capacity - one plant of 22.4MW and another of 19.6MW. The two new plants will be built on the island of Kyushu, to the south of the main Japanese island Honshu.